Ward Kimball received a phone call from Wernher Von Braun in 1969. "When we landed on the moon, he called me

long distance and said, 'Well, Ward, they're following our script!' Actually, all his calculations were right on the button."

The 3 episodes sold many Americans on the idea of space flight, including a young teenage boy

from Iowa named Stephen Bales. Bales was inspired to become an aeronautical engineer

by one of these very episodes.

"It was about 1956 when I saw that Disney program," Bales remembers. "I must have been 13.

It really wasn't that darned far off, either. It had some exploratory missions. At the time, one of

the big unknowns was what the back side of the moon looked like. So they were checking out the back side and

they were doing radar mapping of the moon. And then they had another flight and actually did the landing. I was watching all of that, and it made a big impression on me. It was outstanding."

Bales went on to play an important role during the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969 as a member of mission control. "It was the Walt Disney cartoon come to life."

Even U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower took notice of Disney's Man in Space. He requested a copy to impress the military top brass who were dismissing space travel as "Buck Rogers science-fiction."

In April 1965, 10 years after Man in Space first aired, Von Braun invited Disney and others involved in the 1950s episodes to tour the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. He hoped that Disney's further involvement in the space program would bring about greater public interest in the future. Today there is a display about Disney's 1950s television shows

and his 1965 Alabama visit at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville.

from the original seven Project Mercury space travelers (and the widow of the seventh) attended the grand

In the early 1950s Collier's magazine invited Von Braun to publish his vision

regarding space exploration. The articles (complete with illustrations from leading

During the early planning stages of EPCOT Center, it was decided that a real-life astronaut be

hired as Vice President of Research and Development (after all a science-fiction writer named

Ray Bradbury was already onboard the project as well). Gordon Cooper, one of the original 7 U.S.

astronauts, served from January 1973 to 1975, as Vice President for Research and Development/EPCOT for

Walter E. Disney Enterprises, Inc. During that time he also lent his expertise to a new

attraction called Space Mountain. Gordon along with the other five surviving astronauts

astronauts selected by NASA back in April 1966, he also served as a member of the astronaut support crew for Apollo 10 and as backup lunar module pilot for the Apollo 12 flight. All these years later, Space Mountain continues to be a popular attraction and has grown to have universal appeal - versions were added to Tokyo Disneyland in 1983, Disneyland Paris in 1995, and Hong Kong Disneyland in 2005.